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The Career of Mobbing: Emergence, Transformation, and Utilisation of a New Concept

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The Career of Mobbing: Emergence, Transformation, and Utilisation of a New Concept Rapport nr 29, 2008 The Career of Mobbing: Emergence, Transformation, and Utilisation of a New Concept OLA AGEVALL Institutionen för samhällsvetenskap _______________________________ VÄXJÖ UNIVERSITET RAPPORTSERIEN Ges ut av Institutionen för samhällsvetenskap vid Växjö universitet. Serien innehåller rapporter och uppsatser författade av lärare och studenter vid institutionen. BESTÄLLNINGAR OCH FÖRFRÅGNINGAR Institutionen för samhällsvetenskap Forskningssekreterare Växjö universitet 351 95 VÄXJÖ © Ola Agevall, Växjö universitet, 2007 ISBN: 978-91-89317-44-4 Omslag: Bläck och Co Reklambyrå, Växjö Tryck: Intellecta Docusys, Göteborg 2 Abstract: Concepts play a part in any scientific endeavour. They simultaneously serve as receptacles for previously attained knowledge, as vehicles of scientific and di- dactic communication, and as building blocks in the construction of new descrip- tive and explanatory schemes. In this sense, concepts are central to the cognitive organisation of scientific disciplines. But disciplines also differ from one an- other, and not just in terms of the stock of concepts deemed necessary for inter- nal scientific communication but also, for example, in terms of the logic of con- ceptual change, the relative influx of connotations, and the degree of universal adherence to specific definitions. One crucial characteristic of the social sciences is that they share part of their vo- cabulary with the lay people they study. In some cases, social scientific termi- nology has trickled into everyday speech; in other cases the social sciences have proceeded by refining and redefining locutions found in natural languages. The aim of this book is to study empirically, by means of a detailed case study, the mechanisms that shape concept formation in the social sciences. It focuses on the history of the concept of ‘mobbing’, with special reference to the interaction be- tween science and lay conceptions. This condensed conceptual history shows that the public discourse, that was instrumental in the diffusion and entrenchment of the notion of mobbing in the early 1970s, significantly shaped the career, con- tents, and uses of the corresponding scientific concept. Keywords: Mobbing, Bullying, Concept formation and transformation, Issue- symbiosis, Conceptual contagion, Conceptual history, Sociology of science. 3 Table of Contents 1. Introduction....................................................................................................... 5 2. Enigmas in the conceptual history of ‘mobbing’ .............................................. 7 3. Between journalism and ethology................................................................... 10 4. Issue-symbiosis, conceptual contagion, and institutional backing.................. 18 5. The early image of mobbing: an analytical model .......................................... 25 6. Mobbing and the scientific literature .............................................................. 27 6.1. Dan Olweus and mobbing cum aggression...................................... 29 6.2. The meaning of ‘mobbing’ .............................................................. 34 6.3. Olweus’ empirical results and theoretical framework ..................... 40 7. Conceptual entrepreneurialism and embedded discursive remnants: an analytical summary ............................................................................................. 47 8. Coda: a note on ’mobbing’ since the mid 1980s............................................. 52 References........................................................................................................... 63 4 1. Introduction It is a commonplace that the social sciences share the vocabulary of those lay people who are their objects of inquiry. Save for a handsome amount of technical or quasi-technical terms, we deal in the same ordinary language categories as the people we interview or the bureaucracies we study. From time to time, the rela- tion between ordinary language and social science terminology has been turned into an object of inquiry. In the early 1960s, Serge Moscovici (1961) studied pat- terns of distortion that recur when social scientific concepts trickle into ordinary language and are used by laymen. In the 1970s, the conservative German phi- losophers of the Tendenzwende argued that social scientific terminology was pol- luting everyday speech. But terminology does not flow in one direction only. Words with an extra-scientific pedigree are often picked up, modified, and turned into scientific concepts by the social sciences. The aim of this essay is to begin to charter, in a detailed case study, how such processes work.1 The concept of ‘mobbing’, whose evolution we will follow in this essay, has some properties that make it into a suitable laboratory for that purpose. First of all, it has an identifiable and quite recent date of birth in ordinary language. Se- cond, a lot has happened to it in the course of just a few years, from November 1969 to 1973. Although I will make considerable excursions outside of this time span, the sequence of events that is played out in this condensed period is central to an understanding of subsequent events: the timing, manner, and context of the birth of ‘mobbing’ contributed to the shaping and entrenchment of a dominant strand of research in the field. Third, while ‘mobbing’ as a concept began as a local Swedish affair, it has since become staple goods in international social sci- entific discourse. What I offer is less than a full account of how the term traver- sed national borders, but there is enough material here to give an idea of how it ––––––––– 1 A sibling to this essay – a history of the concept of stereotypes – is under preparation. 5 happened. A relatively simple and condensed story, ‘mobbing’ is ideally suited for extracting some basic ideas about conceptual careers in the social sciences. In the pages to come, we will follow its meanderings from lay conceptions to scien- tific concept and back again. It is a tangled story, and an intriguing topic for the sociology of knowledge and science, involving complex interactions between science, media, school, new and old associations, law, and public administration. 6 2. Enigmas in the conceptual history of ‘mobbing’ In 1969, a general physician from Sweden published an article on ‘apartheid’ in a small left-liberal journal. Contrary to what you would expect from the title, the article is not primarily about South African segregationist politics. The author is the concerned father of a black adoptee boy, and he is writing down his reflec- tions on incidents of exclusion and harassment that his son had experienced. Moreover, he does not describe his son’s predicament in terms of racism. The everyday exclusion and harassment he is subjected to, is portrayed as a sort of group violence directed against a single, singled-out individual. The fact that his son is black does matter, for it sets him apart from his social environment; it makes him conspicuous, and so increases the likelihood that he will be targeted for exclusionary and harassing treatment. But other ‘deviant traits’ could have the same effect, and in this sense it is arbitrary that his son happens to be black. Peter-Paul Heinemann, the author of the article, was concerned not with ra- cism but with a phenomenon referred to as ‘mobbing’. The word itself was a ne- ologism, derived from the English verb ‘to mob’, and inspired by Konrad Lo- renz’ work on mob behaviour in animals. No Swedish expression, Heinemann thought, captured what he had in mind: a group of people acting in concert to ex- clude and/or harass a single individual. His terminological deliberations have their ironies, for in English texts the concept ‘mobbing’ is usually considered cumbersome and is translated back into English as ‘harassment’ or ‘bullying’. What comes out as startling, however, is the fact that it has been translated back into English. Some thirty-five years after the publication of Heinemann’s article, in a small Swedish language journal, the concept has trickled into Ang- lophone scholarship. In Sweden it has acquired legal significance, thus spawning 7 a flood of documents to regulate liability and due process. The word ‘mobbing’ itself has been taken up in foreign languages, e.g. German and Norwegian, and is arguably one of Sweden’s main linguistic exports in modern times. A pivotal event in this history was the publication of psychologist Dan Olwe- us’ book on mobbing in schools in 1973, some three and a half years after the appearance of Peter-Paul Heinemann’s article on apartheid (Olweus 1973). It was the first in what would prove to be a long series of publications on the topic, which in due time made Olweus one of the most cited Swedish scholars in the field of social science.2 Needless to say, Olweus and others have since refined the approach. But the questions posed in that first book, the definitions it sug- gests, the methodology it employs, and the theoretical outlook it draws upon set the agenda for future research. Olweus’ first book in the field was no mean achievement. It reported results from five empirical investigations, comprising data on nearly one thousand twel- ve to sixteen year old boys in Solna and Stockholm, and using a variety of quan- titative methods to assess prevalence and test hypotheses. It was also the first scholarly book on mobbing. Yet in the preface the author explains that the inten- ded audience for the book is the general reader. The reason why
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